If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere, sang Frank Sinatra in New York, New York, a song that used to end every 18th and 21st birthday party in Ireland. It wasn’t just the Irish who yearned to go west we all did, enamoured by American plenty and American violence.
The great hope that America offered to Europeans, and the rest of the world, no longer seems so attractive.
That is the background for the presidential race. The job remains the most powerful in the world but only US citizens can apply, so we look with wonder and surprise at this great, slow, process of finding a tenant for the White House.
Yet the man in the White House isn’t Oz, not all powerful. US Presidents rarely get done what they promise.
With the glorious exception of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal, which harnessed the benefit of big government to revive the American economy, most “leaders of the free world” don’t achieve that much.
Kennedy kept a cool head over Cuba, but there’s precious little else than tattered PR which remains from his presidency. Lyndon Baines Johnson promised a “Great Society” but is remembered for the ongoing oppression of black Americans and the Vietnam War. Nixon went to China, which was good, but he should also have gone to jail. Carter presided over the peak of American household wealth, but it didn’t seem like that at the time and he had the bad luck of the Iranian hostage crisis to make him exit after only one term.
Ronald Reagan lasted two, during which he may have brought down the USSR by his ambitious defence spending, but also undid the social fabric of the USA by accelerating the great wealth divide. George Bush senior recognised the mistake he coined “voodoo economics” and then pledged a “kinder, gentler America” so much so that the invasion of Iraq in 1991 actually obeyed the UN resolution. US troops pulled out before Saddam Hussein was toppled this turned out to be a terrible thing in that future presidents would bully the UN, and another Iraq War would be invented, doing much to destroy the faith voters have in politicians.
Clinton failed in his great ambition to reform health care (a task he delegated to his wife, Hillary) but did “reform” US banking such that it would implode in 2008. George Bush junior would have a presidency defined by fanaticism from 9/11 to endless wars which can now be seen to have achieved nothing.
And along comes Barack Obama, with a near-identical package of hope/modernity/making America great as previous candidates, from Kennedy onwards. By virtue of his colour, he appeared to close the book on white-on-black violence, yet the daily killing of black people became a theme of his presidency. He did get health care reform through, but couldn’t close Guantanamo or reverse the USA’s widening wealth divide.
The limits come in two forms: congress and the constitution. With Congress and the Senate on separate electoral cycles, the president’s wish is often blocked. The constitution means the wilder excess is curtailed Nixon was impeached and Clinton escaped that fate by a hair’s breadth.
Presidents, it turns out, are pretty bad at “making America great”. Most European nations rate far better on the measures of health, happiness and longevity. Americans make do on devaluing wages, working longer hours, and living in fear of life’s accidents.
The accumulation of presidential ineffectiveness as detailed above accounts for the state of the nation today. The days of plenty are over. Either the stuff has gone, as exemplified by a city like Detroit, or it has become obese a deathly over-consumption. Neither looks sexy.
The days of violence are apparently hard-wired into the national psyche. The Scottish economist Angus Deaton won his recent Nobel prize for work on how white, middle-aged American men are dying early, from a combination of bad habits and hopelessness.
These things drive the success of Donald Trump. Should he succeed, Congress and the Constitution will curtail his more excitable urges but we should worry about what he represents. An Empire in decline, struggling for purpose.
There are a lot of Americans who like his plain-talking chauvinism. They aren’t mad or stupid, but adrift in a society which appears not to care for them. They are struggling to match the rhetoric of America with the reality.
Trump has shaped future presidential elections. Even if it’s not him for 2016, then sometime soon it will be someone like him who is in office. The fault doesn’t lie with the person who takes the opportunity but the system which made the opportunity in the first place.
Which is why our attention should be as much on the quality and vision of his likely challenger. The shock of these US primaries is the apparent inability of an establishment candidate like Hillary Clinton to have any answer for what he represents.
The Empire is falling, and the next presumed president has shown no ability to address the people’s anger.